Tag: subsidiarity

Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy, or compassionate medical assistance in dying. It looks patronizingly at best and with hostility at worst, at the idea that our modern despair should prompt some deep rethinking.

Harvard Law School produces many of our future rulers, and it may be better for us if aspiring federal administrators learn from Vermeule at least the presumptive desirability of honoring local institutions. Yet Vermeule would only be teaching them a carefully-regulated localism whose contours would be subject to the decisions of the federal administrative state.

A thing without proper limits becomes its own opposite, and benevolence quickly becomes a tyranny which threatens both civil and religious order.

If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed.

But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit together?